The phone rang on a Wednesday late in January. The line, when I picked up the phone, had the familiar hiss of a call from Chapala, and I waited for Dad to tell me Mom had her papers and they would be going to Fort Myers. Instead, it was one of their neighbors. When a neighbor of your elderly parents calls from far away, you will not receive good news. The woman told me that Dad had collapsed that morning at breakfast and was in a hospital in Guadalajara.
Mom was in bed when I arrived in Chapala. She was dozing sitting up, pillows plumped around her. “Oh, Nick,” she said when I shook her awake, as if I’d just walked over from next door. “Your father’s not here. I don’t know where he is.”
“He’s in the hospital, Mom.”
“The hospital? Oh, that’s right. Well, tell him hello for me, will you? I think I’ll stay right here.”
It was Saturday by then. The two intervening days had been filled, for me, with phone calls and assessments and arrangements and rearrangements, the logistical overload of family crisis. During that time, Mom apparently had been oblivious. With Dad not around to get her up, she stayed in bed. The neighbors had been bringing her meals. She seemed untouched by what had happened, as paradoxically fragile and yet buoyant as a light bulb bobbing in a raging sea. Beside her, the small black cat stretched, yawned, and rolled onto its back. I guessed the neighbors had been feeding the cat, too.
It was too late to go into Guadalajara, so I unpacked, showered and changed, and made myself a drink. I felt alone, and didn’t want to be, but there was nobody else who could decide what needed to be done. Dad’s heart had started to beat too slowly and too weakly to sustain him. The digitalis no longer gave it enough of a kick. It beat so slowly and weakly on Wednesday morning while he was waiting for his eggs and bacon at La Viuda that the blood reached his brain only in a trickle. The brain had too little oxygen to function, and he collapsed as the waiter, Lupe, was arriving with a pot of coffee. By falling to the floor (startling the restaurant cat, Zapata), he placed his heart on a level with his head and made the heart’s job easier. One of my parents’ friends, a nurse, was sitting at a nearby table, and she made it easier still by raising his feet, in effect pouring blood toward his brain. All that had saved him. To go on living any kind of life, he would need a pacemaker.
I tried to figure out what he would want, what made sense. I could take them back to the United States, but he and Mom together would be too much to handle. I could take him to Guadalajara’s public hospital to be screened for an operation, to which he was theoretically entitled as a benefit of his Mexican social security. He would like that; he would think he was getting his money’s worth. But the screening could take weeks or months, and approval wasn’t guaranteed. It was just as likely that he’d be forced to limp along on digitalis till he died. Somehow I thought that Dad’s theoretical fondness for the system would not stand this practical a test. The other option was to pay for the operation where he was.
Night fell and the lights blinked on in the garden’s other houses and apartments. A knock came at the door. It was the woman from Minnesota whose husband had met me at the airport. She was carrying a pot of soup. She went straight into the kitchen and, over my protests that she’d been kind enough already, prepared a tray and took it in to Mom. “Poor thing,” she said when she came out. “We all feel a lot better now that you’re here. Maybe it will perk her up a little.”
Mom was awake later when I went in to clear her plate. She had her radio earplug in and was fiddling with the dial, trying to pick up Larry King. She slept fitfully at night. Listening to the late-night talk show was her favorite pastime. Larry King was her American reality, just as Dad’s was the political news he couldn’t tolerate and the misfortunes of his favorite baseball team, the Atlanta Braves.
“Who’s he talking to tonight?” I asked.
She took the earplug out and patted the edge of the bed for me to sit. “It’s not that interesting,” she said. “Tell me, when is your father coming home?”
“I don’t know. A few days.”
“Will he be all right?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“I hope so,” she said. She paused, then smiled at me with a touch of her old lucidity. “But it has been calm around here for a change.”
I drove into Guadalajara in the old Plymouth the next morning, after making Mom promise to get up and wash her hair. Hopital del Carmen was in the western section of the city, in the sector called Hidalgo, on a quiet tree-lined street behind a shopping center. It was a 1950s-style building, placed lengthwise and uninterestingly along the street. I asked for Señor John Taylor and was directed to Room 216.
Dad was lying there looking at the ceiling, fidgeting, obviously bored. “Hi, Dad,” I said. He looked up and broke into a big, wide grin. He peered at his watch to show he’d been expecting me, struggled to a sitting position, and swung his legs, spindly under his hospital gown, over the side of the bed.
“I’m glad you’re here, Nick,” he said as he felt for the floor with his feet. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Dad!”
He looked and caught me laughing. “What’s so funny?”
“It’s not quite like that. The doctor says you need a pacemaker.”
“Well, good, I’ll get a pacemaker. Let’s go.”
I explained that the cardiologist, a man I’d met only on the phone, was due for a meeting. So was a woman who sold a brand of pacemaker. We had to talk with them and decide what to do.
“You tell me,” he said. “Just get me the hell out of here.”
Dr. Francisco Javier Robles Torres walked in sometime later. Javier Robles was tall, pleasant, and young, somewhere in his thirties, I thought. He had trained in cardiology at the University of Texas. The pacemaker woman arrived, dressed in a power suit. We spoke in English. Dad followed the conversation carefully, looking at each face in turn. When they left fifteen minutes later, the pacemaker woman had a substantial check and the operation was scheduled for the following afternoon.
“What did they say?” Dad wanted to know.
“Tomorrow afternoon. You’ll be home by Wednesday or Thursday.”
He looked glum, but he didn’t argue. He settled back into the bed with a big sigh. I dug in the bag I carried for a sheaf of crossword puzzles I’d been saving for him. When I left him later, he was busily at work.
I returned the next morning with a change of clothes. A steady stream of neighbors had been busy in Chapala; Mom was well looked after and I was relieved to be able to focus on Dad in the hospital. It seemed to be expected that I would sleep in his room. There was a couch in the room that the doctor had indicated with a shrug.
A ghoulishness overtook me as the hour of the operation neared. I felt I had to be in the operating room. It was something I wanted to see, and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity. The doctor looked at me strangely, but he agreed and showed me to the scrub room, where I put on a green operating suit and mask and tied sterile bags over my shoes. The operating room was large, with green tile walls and a faded red tile floor. In an adjoining room, the doctors were choosing their operating music, and when Dad was wheeled into the room a radio was playing a jumpy version of “Walk Right In, Sit Right Down.”
Dad was pale. His face was taut with apprehension as a nurse positioned him on the operating table. “We’ll have something to talk about after this, won’t we?” I said, trying to relax him with a bluff performance.
His expression rebuked me. “You will,” he replied.
I watched as the doctor cut a pocket in the flesh over his right pectoral muscle. I watched my father’s blood well from the wound. The pacemaker was a shiny steel disk, flat on one end, the size of a large pocket watch. The doctor found a vein, and all eyes turned to a black-and-white monitor as he fished a wire through the vein toward my father’s heart. The wire seemed alive, a dark spirillum writhing against the gray glow of the screen. On another monitor, Dad’s heartbeat fluctuated wildly, barely disturbing the tracking line and then sending it bucking and plunging at sharp angles. At last the barb in the wire’s end found a purchase in his heart. The battery in the pacemaker started sending its metronomic signals. The monitor line stabilized in steady blips. I watched life reenter my father’s face. A ruddy pink replaced the dead gray pallor. It was like watching a flower bloom. It was amazing. I felt that by being there, I’d somehow helped invent him, rosy-cheeked and new, and I felt an overwhelming tenderness for him I’d never felt before.
Moments later, the steely lozenge tucked away under fresh sutures and stinging his heart seventy times a minute, Dad was wheeled from the operating room.
I spent two nights in the hospital. Late at night, when he was asleep, I sat under a fifty-watt bulb at a small table in the lobby, drinking pallid coffee from a machine and working through the copy-edits flagged on the manuscript of my new book. This is a painstaking process, one that requires concentration, but no one ever bothered me as I worked. I hardly heard a footfall. Sometimes I would walk to the door and look out into the night, and find myself meeting the eye of the night guard who patrolled with a carbine slung behind one shoulder. By the third day, Dad was ready to go home. I put the bill on my American Express card and we walked into a bright afternoon that was warm in the sunshine.
Dad was stiff and sore where the stitches bound him, but he still was so transformed that it was easy to forget that only days before his heart had been about to gutter out. As we neared Chapala he said, “You know, I think I’m a little hungry. I haven’t had a decent meal in days. What about some lunch?”
“What about Mom?” I asked.
He looked at his watch. “She’s probably eaten already,” he decided.
“Where do you want to go?”
“What about La Viuda?”
So he wanted to return to the scene of the crime. I drove past the bullring and their street and into town, made the right turn where the road heads west along the lake to Jocotepec, and parked. A dry smell of tinder and parched earth filled the air as we walked along the street. The restaurant was empty in the middle of the afternoon. Dad looked around, disappointed. He wanted some fanfare. We sat against the wall, away from the draft from the ceiling fans. He ordered a big meal and wolfed it down; I couldn’t believe his appetite. He was about to order a piece of cherry pie when he hesitated, looked distressed, and said, “You wait here, Nick. I’ll be right back.” He rose and hurried off in the direction of the bathroom.
Damn, I thought, cursing him for ignorance and gluttony and myself, for being stupid. I got up and followed him.
He was straightening up from the sink when I walked in. He looked chastened and a little pale. “I’m all right. I just ate too much,” he said. He was determined to put on a good face, and added, “I think I’d better skip the cherry pie.”
Mom had roused herself for his return. She was sitting in her chair, wrapped in sweaters, heating pad against her face. She rose slowly as we entered the house. Dad walked straight to her. “Hello, Mammy,” he said.
She offered him a kiss. He pecked her on the lips and she placed a hand against his cheek. “How are you?”
“Sore as hell.” He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled down his undershirt to show her the bandage.
“Look at that,” she said. “It’s been awfully quiet around here.”
“Has it? That’s good.” He yawned suddenly.
“I think I’m ready for a nap. What about you, Mammy?”
“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked.
He looked guilty for about half a second. “No. We just ate. At La Viuda. I had beef Stroganoff. It didn’t agree with me.”
“You did?” She looked vaguely disappointed. “Where was I?”
“You mean you haven’t eaten yet? Nick thought you’d probably eaten.” He looked at his watch, yawned again, and yawed off toward their bedroom.
“Thanks a lot, Dad,” I called after him.
“Don’t worry, Nick,” she said. “I’ve had more food than you can shake a stick at. People have been bringing me food all week. Good, too. Better than your father’s cooking. I’ll just have a little snack.” She rummaged in a drawer, found one of her white chocolate bars, and followed him into the bedroom.
While they slept, I started to pack for the trip home. I thought I could leave safely. Dad functioned well enough to look after himself and Mom, and if I stayed he’d expect to be treated like an invalid. Besides, there was nothing to do but wait for the papers that would let them leave Mexico without the car.
When I took my suitcase from the closet, my eye fell on a heavy cardboard box stuck away in a back corner. It was stiff and sturdy, made with handholds in the ends for lifting and as fondly familiar as such a mundane item as a cardboard box can be. It bore the marks of Barber’s Apple Orchard, where my mother had worked around the time that I was born. It had moved with them from place to place ever since I could remember. I lifted the box from the closet, removed the lid, and looked inside.
Among the papers and folders the word “Argonaut” stood out, embossed on what looked like a leather cover. I drew it out and opened my mother’s high school annual, Iron Mountain High School, Class of 1927. I found her picture moments later amid a predominance of jug-eared Swedes. She hadn’t started wearing glasses yet. Her hair was cut in a flapper bob. The caption over her five lines of activities read, “She is small, but so is a stick of dynamite.”
Soon my hands were covered with the dust of old papers: postcards and letters, business cards, photographs, clippings, story proposals. As I looked through them, I saw my mother as an ingenue, full of life and promise, then as a career girl, then a young wife, then a working mother. Her first job out of college, probably the only one she could find in those early Depression years, was as the sole reporter for the Rising Sun, a Muslim weekly in Chicago. She had worked at the Chicago World’s Fair. She had worked in Detroit for the American Automobile Dealers’ Association and for J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency. Apparently, from the exchange of letters that I read, she could have gone somewhere in advertising if she had accepted a transfer to New York. She had written well-crafted and ultimately fruitless queries to magazines; I knew something about that.
I sat on the floor, the dust of her memories thick on my hands. She had a broader life than I had known. Still, I thought, what if? What if she had been born in a time more receptive to her talents? What if she had been more ambitious? What if—most intriguing—she had gotten to New York and not had shoes too tight, had left her hotel room and walked around the city and fallen for its rude charm and energy and spark? Of course, it is only happenstance that produces each of us. Coincidence upon coincidence leads to every birth. Then we try to defy coincidence for the brief span of our lives, until we are taken by coincidence. There is no what if. There is only was and is and will be. I could have no regrets about my mother’s life.
That night after supper, instead of retiring to read in bed or tune in to Larry King, she asked to see my manuscript. I was pleased. I brought it out, almost five hundred pages, and she sat in the living room next to the cold fireplace and started reading. I expected her to get a flavor of the story, be suitably impressed, and go to bed. She kept reading. She read and read. I sat opposite her, trying also to read but glancing at her furtively. She held the manuscript in her lap and turned the pages one by one against her chest. When there were too many and they started to collapse, she placed them face down on the coffee table and went right back to reading. I drank one glass of brandy, then another. The house grew chilly. Dad came in from the bedroom and stood at the edge of the light. “When are you coming to bed, Mammy?” he demanded. “I’m reading Nicky’s manuscript,” she said. He stood a moment longer, grunted, and retreated. Mom read on. Or seemed to. I couldn’t tell whether she was just looking at the pages or actually reading.
“You don’t have to read the whole thing, you know,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I want to.”
Eleven came, and midnight. I was getting dizzy on Pedro Domecq. The pile of pages on her lap grew steadily thinner. Finally, at about one o’clock, she turned over the last page. She sat there for a moment. I waited. She looked up, blinking.
“What time is it, anyway?” she asked.
“It’s late, Mom. Almost one,” I said.
“Goodness.” She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes.
“Did you like it? What did you think?” My voice sounded loud to me. I wanted her to have, if only for a moment, the authority I’d seen that afternoon when I was looking through her papers. With it, I wanted her to give me back her praise.
“Oh, yes. It was quite a story. I didn’t like him, though.” She was talking about the mobster at the center of the book. She shivered to show her distaste. “That poor wife. And those kids.” She heaved herself forward to get up, flopped back in the chair, and tried again. I went to help her.
I walked her to their bedroom door. “Thanks for reading it,” I said, and kissed her on the cheek.
She looked at me fondly through exhausted eyes. “You’re a good kid,” she said.
I couldn’t seem to get my parents moved. My friend from college, Gerry Chambers, couldn’t keep his mother in one place. We had continued trading stories about our parents since he’d moved her into the high-rise for the elderly near his Augusta, Georgia, home; it was a form of reassurance and, sometimes, a way of laughing through the tears. His paralyzed, stroke-ridden father breathed on like clockwork in a nursing home. His mother, sharp-tongued and independent, had passed her third year in the high-rise. Those three years apparently had enlarged her love of independence.
Bertha Chambers had left Augusta for a few days the previous October. She told Gerry she was going to the mountains to enjoy the fall colors. The farm where she had lived most of her life was nestled in a high cove. I had been there once. A creek ran behind the house and splashed down to a lake in pools and rills. The red and white oaks, the sweet gum and maple and honey locust trees, would have been brilliant in autumn. The leaves were not through falling before Gerry received her letter saying she wasn’t going back to the high-rise in Augusta.
“And furthermore, she said she didn’t want to pay the next month’s rent,” he told me later. “She wanted to know could I pack up her things and get them out of there real fast.”
Gerry agonized at this, as he had when he’d placed her in the high-rise. His mother was eighty-one, and the farm was so remote that a rifle shot wouldn’t have reached the nearest house. But she was strong. She also was insistent, and he did as she asked. I told him he was lucky.
My parents were inertia-bound. Mom’s papers came through, the permission she needed to leave Mexico without the car. They had four months, but Dad’s doctor advised him against traveling right away. Beyond the delay was the problem of where they would live. The Presbyterian Apartments had a six- to eight-month waiting list, in the event they were accepted. It wasn’t clear they would be; the building, like many, wanted only people who could function on their own. Without Dad, Mom would need regular care. And Dad, after the initial euphoria of his survival, dropped ever stronger hints that he wanted to be free of his responsibility for her.
“I can take care of one person, but not two. I don’t exactly feel like jumping over streetcars,” he told me in one of his calls. They had been more frequent, and fretful, since his operation.
I tried to think of my father’s life. He never had been looked after, really. His early years were painful, I knew from an account he’d written at my urging. His mother had been sick, an alcoholic whose liver failed when he was five. With her death, his father was widowed for the second time. His prosperity had rotted, along with his oranges and dates, in the London dock strike of 1911, and he went to Zanzibar. When he returned, he lived in rooms in men’s clubs. My father, mending slowly from the operation on his hip, was unwanted goods. He lived with an uncle, then with various retainers and friends. After one move, he recounted, “That first night I remember waking up in tears and Lady Lindsey coming into my room and trying to console me. This was something new. To have someone show affection was a new experience and I was not quite sure.”
Later he was packed away to public school, Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, where he received the Bible he had suggested that I read. “All through my school years, where everyone else had a home to go to when holidays came around, I had none,” he wrote. “At the end of every term I experienced an agony of uncertainty of where I was going.” Once he slept on a cot in his father’s room at the Primrose Club in Jermyn Street in London, another time on a sailboat moored in the Crouch River, where he cooked breakfast for his father each morning and stayed alone on the boat each night while his father rowed to shore to eat supper at a yacht club. Little wonder that he wrote, “I felt fortunate to be invited to stay at the home of a school friend.”
In February 1923 his father gave him his gold pocket watch and its heavy gold chain and put him aboard an ocean liner leaving Southampton. My father waved from the deck. He was sixteen. He reached Canada, took a train to Detroit, moved in with his half-sister Irene, and went to work. His father died that May.
To rest, to be cared for a little bit at last, was what he wanted now. At this late juncture of his life he was transferring his responsibilities to me. But I wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily.
“I’m not convinced that the two of you can’t live reasonably independently,” I wrote.
I think Mom will perk up when she gets back to Fort Myers, and I think that even if you don’t feel ‘like jumping over streetcars’ you can still help do the basic chores required of an independent couple. I was aghast when you asked me about Shady Rest. Dad, Shady Rest is a nursing home, and neither you nor Mom is ready for a nursing home quite yet. You said you could take care of one person but not two, but if you think the best solution for both of you is for her to be in a nursing home or some other kind of home without you, I strongly disagree. Of course, I’m sure that’s not what you had in mind at all.
The point is [I lectured], it’s not time to give up the business of living. As long as Mom can get interested in things again, and I think she will in Fort Myers, she’ll be able to participate in a reasonable style of living that will require your help. You have to remember that you two are a team, have been for almost forty-seven years now, and you must continue that way.
Okay, there’s no way to know what is available without my going to Ft. Myers. So Barbara and I will make a trip there in the next couple of weeks. By the time you’re ready to travel we should have some idea about the options.
* * *
Barbara and I drove from her sister’s home in Fort Lauderdale and checked into a hotel on Lover’s Key, the island just below Fort Myers Beach. “The Beach,” as the locals call it, is an island, too—Estero Island—but this lovely name, derived from the Indian tribe that once inhabited the area, is hardly used today.
A stiff March wind had hollowed out the sky and driven the tourists inside. The wind raised whitecaps on Big Carlos Pass, where, I’d always heard when I was growing up, the founder of the oddball Koreshan religion was lying in a glass-topped coffin. The story was not entirely apocryphal; the tomb of Cyrus Teed, who called himself Koresh, was swept off Fort Myers Beach by a hurricane in 1921 and never found. Stranger was the Koreshan belief that our world is the inside surface of a hollow globe and the universe we know is a swirl of gases in the center. God would not have created an infinite universe—so went the Koreshan line of thought—because human beings cannot understand infinity and God would not have created something we cannot understand. There were never very many Koreshans. There might have been more, but they were celibate.
Winter-season traffic had backed up at the one stoplight on Fort Myers Beach. We waited forty-five minutes to get off the island. The road into Fort Myers passed shopping centers where truck farms and gladiolus fields had been. The desire of northerners for warmth had converted sandy muckland and scrubby stands of pine into subdivisions full of houses on quarter-acre lots. It had erected hotels and apartments at the water’s edge. Somewhere in all of this, I hoped, was a place for my parents.
But where? Their bohemian life had left them with meager resources. Groucho Marx refused to belong to any club that would accept him. I didn’t think my parents, unless they could still live independently, would live in any place they could afford. Barbara and I had made a lot of phone calls, and we didn’t expect to find a retirement home for seven hundred and eighteen dollars a month that didn’t make us shudder. The seven eighteen was the total of their Social Security checks. It would cover their rent at the Presbyterian Apartments. There wouldn’t be much left, but I could help them a little. They also had about fifty thousand dollars in their various accounts, thanks in part to a bequest from one of Mom’s sisters. That would let them live nicely for a while, but it would go quickly. They could outlive it. When it was gone and they had no money at all, they would have no choice but Medicaid—medical welfare—and someplace sad with stale odors.
That puzzled me as infinity confounded the Koreshans. It seemed to me the spiral of comfort should lead up, not down. People who slept early on coarse muslin should lie on linen at the end if they’ve a little money set aside. But the luxocracy of health care forced them to give up the dignity of a small nest egg, or juggle to save it against catastrophe. A lawyer I knew specialized in “estate preservation.” He told me to make sure my parents didn’t have an estate. I had written to my father, “You will have to appear to have no assets. If you have any, the government will make sure you spend them.”
We drove through Fort Myers’s downtown. It was painted and hung in old Florida colors to attract people from the malls, but it slept on. A few blocks east, we turned into the parking lot of a tall building whose name made it sound like a resort. I guess that was the idea. Calusa Harbor was supposed to be one of the best of the ACLFs—adult congregate living facilities—on a list the state had sent us.
An efficient young woman showed us around. The place was bright and clean, with a medical staff and a dining room. It offered three levels of care: independent living, assisted living, and a nursing home. The independent living package came with one meal a day and weekly cleaning and linen service. Assisted living included services such as help with dressing and reminders to take medications. I could see Mom and Dad living there. They would be safe and well looked after. Services would increase with their needs.
“How much?” we asked. The least expensive one-bedroom apartment cost almost twice their monthly income.
We drove a little farther east and turned into a residential neighborhood. Following directions Barbara had scribbled in a notebook, we found our way to a place that looked like a fifties-style motel. There was a central building that once must have been a private home, flanked by two separate residential wings.
A woman met us at the door of the main building, and took us into a lounge full of men and women dully watching television. Outside a big picture window, a walk led through a coarse lawn to a dock that poked into the windswept Caloosahatchee.
Our host offered to show us the room the facility could offer my parents. “They like this,” she said, “they” apparently referring to the generic elderly, as she led us along an open walkway. “It makes them feel like they’re getting outside.”
The room was the size of a motel room, with old wooden furniture, unremarkable framed prints on the walls, a bathroom in green tile, printed draperies. Shrubbery, or the eaves, blocked light from the windows. There was a refrigerator, but no kitchen; three meals a day were served in the dining room, which looked across the lawn to the river. The extra meals made the place more expensive than Calusa Harbor. We backed away, bobbing up and down with false assurances that we’d be sure to call.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Barbara when we were in the car.
She kicked off her sandals and propped her bare feet on the dashboard. Her hair was black then, before the tints and highlights that changed her to the redhead she said she was always meant to be. “Keep looking,” she said. That was one of the reasons I loved her: her indefatigability.
But by the end of the afternoon I was ready to give up. We had crossed off the list places that were too far out of town or masquerading boarding homes. Every other place was too expensive or too shabby, or both. We had had no better luck with apartments. We had looked at buildings with sun-faded cars parked out front and loud music playing behind every hollow door. We looked at a converted hotel in the somnolent downtown. We interrupted a card game in a garden apartment that was advertised for sale, where the owners told us everything was so convenient, as long as you could drive. We finally returned to the Presbyterian Apartments to find the waiting list just as long and the application requirement intact. “No, we don’t make exceptions,” said the man behind the desk. “Even if they lived here before, they might not still be qualified.”
We were near the river then, a little west of downtown, so we decided to probe one of the nearby side streets. It was an area of small offices, struggling motels, and old homes, the kind starry-eyed young couples dust off into bed-and-breakfasts, anchored by apartment buildings at the river’s edge and a shopping center that contained a Woolworth’s and a Kash-N-Karry supermarket. The street ended at the river. On one side was a new apartment building where the rental agent quoted prices that were far too high. The building across the street was squat by comparison. Its sign announced it as the Riverside Club.
“Let’s go over there,” Barbara said.
“Oh God, what’s the use?” I complained. “Let’s go back to the hotel and get a drink.”
“Come on,” she said. “It’s right there.”
I sighed and huffed my way to the door of the Riverside Club, where we met a man who told us to call one of the numbers on the directory at the door. After several minutes, during which we took stock of the swimming pool and landscaping, a white-haired woman emerged. Her name was Bess Jones. She cocked her head when I asked if she had anything to show us. “Oh, honey, I sure have,” she said.
“Do I know your parents?” she asked as we waited for the elevator. I gave the thumbnail history and she exclaimed, “Why sure I do!” Bess said she remembered my mother’s News-Press byline and knew several of her friends. She explained, volubly, that the seven-story Riverside Club had been Fort Myers’s tallest building when it was built, in 1965. “They called it a skyscraper,” she said, chuckling. The people who bought its condominium apartments were mostly old-timers who predated the area’s rapid growth; they remembered Hurricane Donna and the rickety swing bridge to Fort Myers Beach. I decided that for my parents, it would be like finding Brigadoon.
We looked at several apartments, but the one that fit them and the one we could afford was a one-bedroom on the seventh floor, facing the river. It was owned by the estate of a woman who had died. Her homely velveteen furniture came with the place. We agreed to buy it anyway, for forty thousand dollars.
“Dad, it’s perfect,” I said when I called them with the news. “No fire drills. You can walk to restaurants, so you don’t have to cook if you don’t want to. No rent to pay, so you can get someone in to clean. You can manage it. I know you can. And Mom will love it.”
“I don’t know, Nick. You know I don’t feel like jumping over streetcars. But I guess it’s worth a try.”
I confirmed the deal and, from New York, arranged the necessary money transfers.
Feeling there was no more time to waste, we worked quickly to ready the apartment. We especially wanted Mom to feel at home there. Before we left Fort Myers, we hired a decorating service to repaint, to rip out the dingy olive carpet and replace it with Mom’s favorite shade of green. We ordered matching sun-reflective window shades, a new dishwasher, and a rattan living room set in a splashy tropical floral. I thought it would remind her of a sofa we had once that she had liked. We called a secondhand store to pick up most of the old furniture. I arranged phone and electric service and set up a savings account to receive their funds.
I left it to Dad to arrange their end of the move. I felt a little guilty about this, but it seemed straightforward enough. He could contact the movers, show them what to pack, and keep out of the way. I didn’t want to return to Chapala. I didn’t think I’d have the patience for it, and there really was no need. They would fly to Fort Myers and we would meet them.
They set a date in the middle of April. Barbara and I returned to add the finishing touches. We scurried through the Edison Mall buying kitchen utensils, linens, lamps, a vacuum cleaner, a remote control TV, and a phone with a volume control. We took dining chairs to be recovered. We unwrapped and washed their blue-and-white Haviland wedding china and stacked it in the cabinets. We stocked the kitchen with staples and their favorite foods. It was as if we could make the apartment beautiful and welcoming enough to overcome my parents’ frailties and negate my father’s doubts, as if by giving it life and charm and brightness we could renew theirs.
Bess looked at all the work we were doing. “Are your parents all right?” she asked.
Just fine, I told her.
“Oh my, I wish you were my children,” she said.
I spent the last day before they came in a do-it-yourself shop, framing some of my father’s prints and watercolors.
Framing pictures suited me. It is intricate work, requiring attention but not much thought, and the mind wanders. You start by placing lengths of frame molding into two vises set at right angles to each other and fitting their mitered ends together, then tapping in brads to fix them. Then you go on to the next corner, and the next. My parents were coming home. Bedraggled birds on their last migration. Whatever happened next would be easier. It had to be. They would like their new apartment. I thought of it as theirs, although the deed was in my name and Barbara’s. Odd to say, but I was encouraged that its previous owner had died there, or approached her death. That translated it somehow into an end point, a terminus. The woman had lived alone, struggled with her illness, endured her infirmities there, in that apartment, and that meant my parents could do the same. Dad would have to do his share in taking care of Mom. But they could manage. Mom’s friends would help her to renew the spark she’d lost. So would the pictures I was framing, laying glass into one of the completed frames now and wiping the back clean.
Suddenly I felt the gaze of the other people in the shop and realized I had laughed out loud. I had been thinking of my father in a retirement home, unleashing his temper around blue-haired ladies and doddery men, something about the food, maybe, or the television. The woman in Chapala with the dog had told me, “We’re going to miss your mother, she’s just so sweet, but your father…” She shook her head and twisted her mouth around an imaginary lemon, and I had nodded in complicity. That was enough reason to keep Mom and Dad independent as long as they could manage it; it was just good manners.
I laid a piece of art into the frame behind the glass, stood it up, and studied it. It was a watercolor he had done in Mexico, adobe buildings and blue sky. I added the backing, fixed it with staples, sealed it with Elmer’s Glue and paper, screwed a pair of eyes into the frame, and twisted on a length of wire. Then I started on another frame.
The apartment was beautiful when we left to meet them the next day, April 15, two days before Mom’s eightieth birthday. It was spotless, with all the pictures hung and all the conveniences in place. We backed out of the door trying not to disturb the freshly vacuumed carpet, congratulating ourselves with every step. At the airport, their plane arrived almost as we did, and we didn’t have to wait at all. The old gringo limped off the plane on full alert, casting around fiercely. He looked relieved when he saw us. Mom produced a fleeting smile and said, “Look who’s here. Your frail old parents.”
Bess and her sister managed to be around the door of the apartment building when we returned. Bess made a point of knowing what was going on at the Riverside Club. She fussed over Mom and Dad and told them how much they were going to love their apartment. “These kids of yours did so much work,” she said.
“I hope they didn’t do too much,” Mom said.
“We won’t be here that long,” Dad said.
“That’s right,” Mom added. “We’re going back to Mexico as soon as possible. We have to get our Social Security straightened out, and then we’re going back.”
“You are?” Bess drew out “are” into two or three syllables. Her squarish face wrinkled in perplexity.
I didn’t know if this was wishful thinking or delusion, but I turned to Bess and whispered, “I don’t really think so.” Turning back to my parents, I said, “You’ll have to be here for a little while, I guess, so why don’t we go on up?”
The elevator droned its slow way to the seventh floor and we clambered out with their luggage. I gave each of them a set of keys to the apartment, Mom’s with a coiled plastic bracelet so she could wear them on her wrist and wouldn’t lose them. Dad opened the door and they went in and looked around and nodded and didn’t say anything. Mom went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, got up, came into the living room, and sat down on the rattan sofa with the floral print. Dad peered at the pictures, one by one. He went to the window and looked out at the river.
Finally Barbara said, “Do you like it, Clare?”
Mom said, “It’s very nice, for something somebody has set up for you.”
We took them to dinner that night at a restaurant that had been their favorite when they lived at the Presbyterian Apartments. Dad liked the prime rib with horseradish sauce. Mom ordered shrimp. They were tired from the trip, and Mom seemed as if she were trying to pick her way through cobwebs. Barbara and I were antsy. When we got to the coffee, I said, “You just got here. Why are you talking about going back to Mexico?”
“Oh, my desk is just a mess,” Mom said. “I didn’t have time to clear it off.”
Dad leaned forward. “What’s that, Nick?” he said.
“I wondered why you were going back to Mexico so soon.”
He dribbled some coffee from his saucer back into the cup. “Oh. Well, I have a doctor’s appointment in two weeks,” he said.
My troubles were over. My parents were safely back in the United States, and they weren’t going back to Mexico. I knew it, if they didn’t. They couldn’t afford it, for one thing. I had spent most of their money on the apartment.
Barbara and I returned to New York the next day. Barbara’s mother told her we were leaving too soon, that my parents needed emotional support in addition to a place to live. But we had spent ourselves. Neither of us had the patience for a hand-holding transitional term.
That Monday I spent an hour on the phone talking Dad through opening a checking account at the bank in the nearby shopping center. He had the money from their Mexican accounts, and Mom had surprised me by digging in her purse and producing four hundred dollars that the owner of Chapala’s newsstand had given her for the old Plymouth. I explained to a sympathetic woman at the bank that he’d be coming, then told him how to get there and what to say. Barbara, meanwhile, sent Mom a birthday package of clothes by Federal Express.
Six days later, I was aboard a small boat sailing from Bermuda to the Azores. A friend of mine was taking his boat home to England. I love sailing, but the main appeal of the two-week ocean passage was the relief from concern for my parents that the adventure would provide. I assumed they would reorient quickly to Fort Myers. Mom’s first letter had encouraged me, and I sailed with a dear conscience.
“Dear Kids,” she wrote.
Someone brought the parcel from New York up to me from downstairs. I am at present enjoying the blue-and-white-striped top. As soon as I locate a dressmaker or someone handy with a needle I’ll have the skirt shortened and then I will be able to appear in public. I want to thank you both very much for all the Banana Republic goodies. Very comfortable even with the sun pouring into the dining area window (Does the sun pour?). Whatever, it’s bright and hot.
A man called from Social Security to tell us that you had given them our change of address. Thank you, for I’ve never been able to get them on the phone from here. Why? I don’t know. Excuse me while I take time out to get some ice water.
We went to Woolworth’s this morning for breakfast. Tomorrow we’re going to try the Oasis. We’re looking for something to take the place of the Viuda, which was our favorite eating place in Chapala. We’ve been looking at all the good things available at the Kash-N-Karry, which used to be something else. Neither of us remembers the name. (Thank heavens I’m not the only one who has a lapse of memory.)
The sun is about to go down and there’s a nice breeze blowing in the window. We’ve been enjoying the macaroons from Entenmann’s. Is that in New York? A sail boat is speeding downriver. Good view from the dining table.
Thanks again for everything. You’re good kids and we love you a lot.
She wrote again the following Sunday, commenting on the dining table view of “birds, pelicans, and boats, barges.” They still were looking for the perfect breakfast. The letter sounded disjointed but conjured perfectly for me the scene and discussion between them, Dad shaving, then grumping and stomping about: “I’m waiting for Pappy to get dressed so we can go out to breakfast. Where? Captain’s Table, perhaps. We’re eating right here. Have been out for the paper. Now Pappy’s getting breakfast.”
She put the letter aside and started again later in the day: “Good breakfast. But the lamb chops we had for dinner tasted like shoe leather or what I imagine shoe leather must taste like. I’m going for a ride with Bess Jones at 6 P.M. Now for a nap. More later.”
Bess had turned out to be a godsend, a kind and genuinely concerned person who had looked at all the work Barbara and I had done and translated it into interest in my parents. She saw the work as special; therefore my parents must be special. Mom’s longtime friends welcomed her one by one and celebrated with a reunion of the Birthday Girls, friends who for years had feted one another on their birthdays. But Bess, who lived on the floor below and saw them day in and day out, became their closest ally and in that way their monitor.
It was Bess who called after I returned from the Azores in the middle of May to say that they still were living out of their suitcases. She said that Mom had nothing to wear except a pair of baggy shorts. We called to ask Mom about the clothes we’d sent for her birthday. Most of them were still in the box. Mom hadn’t been able to cope with having the skirt shortened; she told Barbara the job was “too tricky.” Their shipment of household goods, which included most of their clothes as well as their books, Dad’s tools, and Mom’s apple box of memories, had not arrived from Chapala. Dad was vague about the succession of movers involved.
“I don’t know, Nick,” he told me. “Just track it down, will you? I need my hats. It’s hot as hell down here.”
The movers in Guadalajara told me the shipment had been handed at the border to a Texas company affiliated with United Van Lines. The dispatcher assured me it was on its way. It was the beginning of June, more than six weeks after they had moved, before Dad called to say it had arrived.
I found an opportunity to see them two weeks later, when I could tack on a business trip. I got a list of doctors from the county medical society and phoned for appointments. “Ft. Myers is a lot easier to get to than Chapala, so I’m glad you’re there,” I said when I wrote to tell my parents I was coming.
I flew to Fort Myers on June 17 and rented a car at the airport. The retiree driving the rental car bus mopped his brow and said it was mighty hot, but it sure did beat Rochester. On the twenty-minute drive into Fort Myers, I played with the buttons of the radio, looking for a station. The scanner hit some country music and I stopped it there. The rawness of it seemed to suit my mood. It was all about sadness and memory and loss and struggle and yearning. Traffic was light, and I made good time. The white-painted Riverside Club gleamed in the sunshine at the river’s edge. I parked the rental in the covered space for 701-A. The front door of the building was unlocked, so I went in without ringing and rode the elevator to the seventh floor. The door to their apartment was open.
Dad was sitting on the sofa in his khakis and a tatty undershirt, intent on a crossword puzzle. Mom sat opposite, nodding in a chartreuse recliner that had been the one piece of velveteen worth saving. A magazine was folded in her lap. The windows were open. A breeze off the river sang through the screens like someone blowing across the mouth of a Coke bottle. The packing boxes filled a quarter of the room, standing unopened where the movers had left them.
“Jesus Christ!” I blurted in a flash of irritation. “Didn’t you put anything away?”
Dad only heard my voice. He looked up and broke into the smile that always amazed me with its directness and sincerity. He was glad to see me, and the fact that I’d seen him smile as warmly at a waitress arriving with a cup of coffee didn’t make me feel less churlish for my outburst. “Hi, Nick,” he said, laying the puzzle aside and rising to greet me with a hug. His skin was damp with sweat. Mom’s head jerked up. “You’re here,” she said, and clambered to her feet.
“It’s awfully hot in here,” I said after a minute. “Why don’t you turn the air conditioner on?”
Mom patted her cheek and grimaced. “My neuralgia,” she said thickly. “I’d use my heating pad, but I don’t know where it is.” She gestured toward the boxes.
“We’ve been waiting for you to get this stuff out of the way,” Dad said.
I checked my anger and started to unpack the boxes. The clothing boxes were the hardest, so tall and deep the only way to get the clothes out was to lift them straight overhead, as if I were a weight lifter trying to press a macramé barbell. No wonder Mom and Dad hadn’t been able to unpack. For some reason, Mom still had wool suits. Some of them must have been fifty years old, and they weighed a ton. Finally I had their clothes hanging in the closet, their eclectic library arranged on bookshelves, and their kitchenware, linens, and papers put away in drawers, on shelves, and within cabinets. The job had taken hours, and I finished with the sober knowledge that tasks I had taken for granted were beyond them.
I was setting the empty boxes out for collection when I realized something was missing. “Mom, where’s that box of yours?” I asked.
“What box?” She looked up from a travel magazine that contained a piece of mine she had read several times already.
“The box of your things. The apple box.”
“Isn’t it here? I don’t know.”
“I can’t find it. Dad, where’s that box with Mom’s things in it? It was in the closet in the guestroom in Chapala.”
“What things?” he asked. He had found his straw hats and was sitting on the sofa with one in his lap, carefully smoothing the brim.
A black vision began forming in my mind: Dad had decided that the box wasn’t important and told the movers to leave it behind, because to send it would have cost a few more dollars. Or he had just grown impatient and told them to forget it. He’d left things before when he’d decided he couldn’t be bothered. The losses had sometimes been painful. He’d abandoned the bookbinding press he used to make his prints when they moved to Mexico the first time because it took up too much room in their old Volkswagen. The press was a beautiful relic, a sculptural tool of wood and steel in which two flat plates were brought together by turning a wheel on a worm gear. When I asked the couple who’d bought my parents’ house if they still had it, the woman refused to give it up. She’d been using it to repair books at the elementary school where she taught. Who could argue? He’d also left behind the blocks from which the prints were taken, and they had been discarded, the painstaking work of his hands. I couldn’t imagine that Mom’s box had simply been forgotten. I’d unpacked some other things—Dad’s carving tools and drawing pens and pencils—from the same closet. I described the box and its contents in detail.
“I don’t know, Nick. Everything that came is here.” He tried the hat on, took it off and gingerly fingered a dark spot on his forehead. The squamous cells were acting up again.
I retraced my search, irrationally peering behind chairs and into corners. “You couldn’t have left it. Tell me you didn’t leave it,” I finally wailed.
“Oh hell, Nick, you can’t keep up with everything. What difference does it make, anyway?” Dad snapped.
“I wanted those things.”
“Well, maybe if you’d been around when we were trying to get packed. I can’t do everything myself, you know. And your mother wasn’t any help.”
“I’m sure it will show up,” Mom said. “Who’s hungry? “
I brooded while we ate at a cafeteria. Paper clips and rubber bands had made it to Fort Myers. They had brought calendar dishtowels from 1984 and 1985 and frying pans shaggy with dried egg. I had found a desiccated chunk of beeswax Dad had used when he was sewing the sails for the boat he’d built thirty years before.
Later, when I called Chapala, the new landlord, the former machine shop owner from Chicago, said there might have been a box. Yes, his wife had wondered that they’d left it, there were photographs and all. But if it was in the house they must not have wanted it, so out it had gone.
I could have slept on the convertible sofa in the living room, but I rejected the thought. The sofa was too depressingly close to the evidence of my mother’s confusion and Dad’s dependence. There was a Ramada Inn practically next door to the apartment building, and I took a room there. The motel restaurant was right on the water.
“Oh, let’s go there,” Mom said the next morning when I went to pick them up for breakfast. Woolworth’s lunch counter had become their routine breakfast stop, their La Viuda in Fort Myers, but it was closed on Sundays. Mom was gaily dressed in a pair of white pedal-pushers, an India print cotton top, and a loose jacket of azure blue. The outfit was such a contrast to her person that I had to fight against seeing her as sadly girlish, like an actress who denies growing older, but it was just what she’d put on that morning, not an intent to hide her age. Dad was wearing khakis with a sprung stitch that exposed the zipper.
“Why don’t you change those?” I suggested.
He looked down. “Oh, hell. Who cares?” he said, and pulled his shirttail out.
I drove them to the restaurant, although it was only a five-minute walk. On a short open stretch along the river, two men were standing with fishing rods angled out over the water. A third lay along the concrete bulkhead, his head propped against a cooler.
We took a table next to the streaked windows that rose from floor to ceiling. The large dining room was full of families dressed for church. There was a buffet, but Mom and Dad ordered from the menu—eggs, toast, and grits. I chose an omelet and we settled down with sections of the paper. Now and then someone from another table would pass us on the way to the buffet at one end of the room. We paused from reading when our food came, then went back to it over refills of our coffee. I had checked the baseball scores and was reaching for the comics when Dad pushed away from the table. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
He walked with his rolling gait to the buffet. He peered at it for a moment, then ducked and reached into one of the trays and snatched a piece of bacon. He gobbled it. Then he snatched a piece of sausage from the next tray and wrapped it in a napkin. This he brought back to the table and shook out onto his plate. I looked around nervously to see if anyone was watching.
“There,” Dad said. “I always like a little bonus.” He speared the sausage with a fork and popped it in his mouth.
I looked at Mom. She shook her head.
“What?” Dad said.
I looked at Mom again, and this time we burst out laughing. Dad watched us. After a minute Mom took her glasses off and wiped her eyes. “What were we laughing at?” she said.
“Your husband.”
“Oh. He’s funny sometimes, isn’t he?” She reached out and patted my father on the hand.
“Why, thanks, Mammy,” he said. Then he asked her if she was going to eat her remaining piece of toast.
* * *
Mom had cleared her desk in Mexico; its contents were jumbled in a series of manila folders that I had stuffed into desk drawers in my parents’ bedroom in my rush to put everything away. That afternoon, while they slept, I tried to put her papers in some kind of order. I took the folders into the living room and sat at the dining table, where the blue slant of the river and the line of its far shore came through the translucent blinds. Gulls wheeled behind a small boat moving among floats that must have marked crab or lobster traps. I didn’t quite understand how reflective blinds could be translucent, but they were, admitting the view and diffused light while hot strips of direct sunlight burned at their edges.
The first folder I opened contained several life insurance policies. One was a cancer policy, one a travel accident policy from AAA, another a policy that paid in case of accidental death or dismemberment. There may have been a fourth. The annual premiums were low, and she’d paid them faithfully, in the case of the cancer policy for almost fifty years. But over the past year, the payments had petered out and stopped. The reminders were filed, unopened. All the policies had lapsed.
It isn’t the money, I thought as I closed the folder and went on to the next. The awards were too low to make much difference, and in any case, she wasn’t likely to die in a way covered by the policies. It was how forgetfulness had thwarted her intent that wrenched at me. It was like seeing little pieces of her fly away.
The next folders contained old check registers and bank records. I looked through them and returned to the bedroom to see what else I could organize. Dad was sitting up against his pillows as he slept, snoring gently, his legs stretched out in front of him. Mom was curled up under a baby blue afghan, her hands under her cheek.
I arranged half a dozen photo albums on a shelf over her desk. She had set out photographs of me, and me and Barbara, on the desktop in dime-store frames. I found her fat address book stuffed between a sheaf of book reviews and a ten-year-old diary that contained mainly shopping lists. Mom had been a voluminous and steady correspondent who was accustomed to sending a hundred Christmas cards. I opened the book. She had scratched out and added addresses that tracked her friends around the country. I closed the book and put it into her desk drawer, where I saw her writing tablet. She had started a letter on the top page, set it aside, and not returned to it. It hung there, mysterious and incomplete.
She was disintegrating that way, piece by piece, in lost shards of memory and conversation, in neglected matters that were once routine, in letters begun and never finished. She was losing the gravity to hang on to them, and they were spinning out of her orbit into unknown, unremembered space.
In the refrigerator, where I went to get a beer, I saw some of the “good things” they had found at the Kash-N-Karry: bags of yogurt candy, bars of chocolate, a box of mint candies. The freezer contained cartons of ice milk next to the TV dinners and pot pies I had stocked for them. I closed it and looked around the kitchen. Their dishes were stacked in a sink rack; the dishwasher I had waited all my life to give them was empty and dry.
All the evidence told me they were on the fragile edge. Dad’s health seemed relatively good; their network in Fort Myers provided a system of warning and support; they still could get around. Beyond that, I was traveling on faith.
We walked to breakfast on Monday morning. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t kidding myself that they could get to the shopping center and back. It was about a ten-minute walk from the Riverside Club, across a street with light but sometimes dangerously fast traffic. Dad walked ahead, rolling side to side, head down. He angled off to buy a copy of the News-Press from a coin box. I followed with Mom at a slower pace; it was early, but already hot. We crossed the street with me acting like a shepherd: Come on, come on. I was relieved when we reached the relative quiet of the shopping center and the shade of its covered walks.
Woolworth’s lunch counter was a throwback, with booths and stools in salmon-colored leatherette and Coca-Cola signs with pictures of hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches on them on the wall behind the counter. A statuesque waitress with cascading auburn curls greeted Mom and Dad warmly. “Oh my, this must be your son,” she said, looking at me in a way that made me wish I were a little more awake. “We’ve heard so much about you, your writin’ and all. Do you want coffee? I know your mom and dad do. Don’t y’all?” When we were settled in the booth and the coffee was steaming up in front of us from thick white mugs, her partner, plump and motherly, arrived. Pencil poised over her order pad, she said, “What’ll you have, honey? I know what your folks want.”
A procession of regulars came and went for the next hour. The waitresses, whose names were Louise and Ann, kept filling our coffee cups. The store’s manager came to say hello. The voices of bickering old men rose from the booth inside the window, next to the display of beach chairs. Bess, her sister Rae, and two other women from the Riverside Club entered talking; they, too, were part of this informal breakfast club. It was the focus of my parents’ day, and I found it comforting. I had called enough aging programs by now to know that they all placed a priority on activities: games, shopping trips and other outings, concerts, sing-alongs. The Woolworth’s breakfast club was an activity. I could keep encouraging them to live independently as long as they had it to look forward to.
Having established that they could get to Woolworth’s on their own, I didn’t force the point by making them walk home. I got the car and drove them.
The medical appointments I’d made for them began that afternoon. Dad grudgingly agreed to see the cardiologist I’d chosen. He hated doctors—or feared them, I wasn’t sure which—but he also desperately wanted to know that his pacemaker was going to keep ticking. The doctor was pleasant, in his thirties. I sat in the examining room with them and explained what I knew about Dad’s pacemaker. The doctor pressed a stethoscope against Dad’s chest, and Dad jumped and said accusingly, “That’s cold.” When the doctor was through listening, he shrugged and said, “Seventy beats a minute, like clockwork. It’s working fine. I’d like to keep an eye on him from time to time.”
“Hear that, Dad? You’re still alive,” I said.
“Huh? That’s good, I guess,” he answered, buttoning his shirt over the outline of the pacemaker. “Let’s go get something to eat.”
“We can’t, Dad,” I told him.
“Why not?”
I told him I’d scheduled general checkups for both Mom and him, one after the other, at an office within walking distance of their building. I wanted to know there wasn’t more wrong with them than there needed to be. He grumbled and sulked when I told him we’d have to eat late, so I dropped him off at the lunch counter and told him to order a sandwich while I took Mom to her appointment.
Mom went uncomplainingly. The doctor who saw her gave me no serious new worries. He said, “She’s got nothing unusual for an eighty-year-old woman. You should watch her diet, though. It seems to me that she’s anemic.” He said he wanted some blood tests run, and handed me directions to a laboratory.
I thought I could leave Dad for his checkup while I ran to the laboratory with Mom. But when I picked him up he said, “Goddamnit, Nick, I’ve already been to the doctor once today.” I didn’t feel like arguing. I called to say that we’d reschedule, dropped Dad at home, and drove Mom to the laboratory. The distances weren’t far, but the logistics had been daunting. It was more than they could have handled on their own.
Dad resumed his griping the next morning when I left him at Woolworth’s to take Mom to an early neurology appointment. I now took her confusion as a given, but I hoped something could be done to ease the stabbing pains in her right cheek. We came away with a prescription, but no information about additional warning signals. I restocked their refrigerator with low-salt, no-fat dinners whose labels made claims about nutrition, wrote checks to pay their bills, and returned to New York more conscious of their frailty. I only hoped they could, as Dad had started to put it when we talked on the phone, “rock along” a little longer.
“Nick?” It was Bess’s voice on the telephone. My name had never had so many syllables.
“Your dad wanted me to call. I’m up here in their apartment. Honey, I’m afraid your mother’s had a little stroke. We’re waiting for the ambulance right now.”
It was early on the morning of July 4, just over two years since Dad had called to say Mom wasn’t herself.
“Is he there now?” I asked. “Can he come to the phone?”
“Nick, your mother’s had a stroke,” he said when he came on the line. He sounded scared.
“Are you all right?”
“What? I don’t know. I tried to get her out of bed this morning and she couldn’t sit up. She just fell over. Bess is here. We’re waiting for the ambulance.”
It must have happened while she was asleep. A CAT scan would show the clogging of her carotid arteries—the main arteries leading to the brain. The diminished flow of blood and oxygen was what caused her confusion. Then a clot broke loose from an artery wall and found its way to a vital juncture. Morning came, and when she tried to respond to Dad’s rousing, something was shockingly missing. Her left leg and arm had deserted her, jumped ship in the darkness.
Dad spent the day at the hospital, but when I talked to him that night he could tell me nothing new. He was concerned about Mom, but he couldn’t hear well enough, and was probably too frightened, to deal with the information. All he could deal with was his own discomfort. Bess said that while they were waiting for the doctor to arrive—a long wait on the holiday—he had suddenly announced that he was hungry and insisted on going out to breakfast.
Mom’s neurologist told me, when I finally got in touch with her, that she had “poor expectations” for Mom’s recovery. Given that, the doctor added, “We have to be concerned about your father’s ability to care for her alone.
“Did the hospital ask if you wanted her resuscitated?” she asked. “If she goes into arrest.”
I thought a moment before answering. My mother had made clear in her living will that she didn’t want to live at all costs, didn’t want just to go on breathing. “No, don’t resuscitate,” I said.
There is no preparation for a stroke and the incapacity it causes, certainly not on the part of the victim. In the case of someone my mother’s age, the humane thing to hope for is death or a complete recovery. Most of the stages in between are a kind of purgatory. When the emergency had passed and Mom was still alive, but now with a leg that dragged and an arm she couldn’t lift, she entered therapy to relearn how to walk. The physical demands on her were greater than they’d been in years.
While Mom struggled in rehabilitation and Dad with the new terrain of loneliness, I encountered an octopus of regulations. Medicare would pay for Mom’s hospitalization and treatment as long as she was making progress, that is, recovering some of her mental faculties and her ability to get around. When she stopped making progress, Medicare would no longer pay and she would be discharged. Maybe Dad could care for her, and maybe not; it depended on the extent of her recovery. The apartment was too small for someone to live with them, and anyway I could not afford it. I could put her in a nursing home, but I didn’t want to do that if I could help it. Another option was occasional visits from an agency that provided home care for the elderly. The right thing to do eluded me.
At the same time Sins of the Father was about to be published, I’d just contracted to turn the story of the mobster and his family into a screenplay, and I was preparing a new book proposal to put before my publisher. These events competed with my parents’ needs for my attention. I talked to Mom on the telephone. Her speech was unaffected by the stroke, but she couldn’t tell me what to do with her.
Mom regained some use of both her leg and her arm, but she couldn’t walk without assistance. She remained “in limbo about whether she wants to go home or to a nursing home,” according to a social worker at the hospital. Peggy Williams, part of an eight-member social work staff, was part hand-holder, part guide, and part interpreter. She was my reassuring point of contact with the hospital. The use of social workers in medical institutions of all kinds has become widespread in the past twenty-five years. They help families cope with their anxiety and grief, and with the tangles of regulations governing their options. In that way, they help divert patients to less costly types of care.
Rehabilitation took Mom as far as it could take her, and a discharge date was set. I had not found a better answer, so she went home. I begged Dad just to try it, to see if he could handle the greater help she now required. The specter of their separation was as frightening as anything that might happen to either of them individually. I didn’t think they could function except as a unit.
Mom suffered a second stroke before his ability to care for her had been well tested. The doctor described it as a kind of aftershock. It weakened her left arm further, but she went home without additional rehabilitation because it would have consumed more of the Medicare days she was allotted. The experiment was a disaster.
First came the unsettling report, relayed by Bess, that Mom was living on a diet of sausages and ice cream. “I’ll have you know John Taylor is a very good cook,” Mom told the friend who looked askance at her nutrition.
She fell, and he couldn’t lift her. She called to him for help one day as he was shaving, and he left the water running as he went to her. Water reached the fifth floor before somebody came up to turn it off. The insurance claim was almost four thousand dollars.
I tried a home health care service, which sent a nurse—rehabilitation therapist. It wasn’t enough. The service’s coordinator told me, “They need more help and supervision in daily living than they’re getting.”
By then—it was late August—Dad was calling every day. “Nick, I can’t hack it. I just can’t hack it,” he said despairingly.
Mom’s third stroke obviated my decision.
The nursing home was across the river from Fort Myers, in a suburb that was now larger than the city. Barbara and I came straight from the airport and picked up Dad at the apartment. He rode in the front of the car, bracing himself with one hand on the door and the other wedged against the seat. The light through the windshield made him squint. His hair had a reddish tint where he brushed it back from his high forehead, and I thought that he must be putting Mercurochrome on the resurgent skin cancers. He poked his stiff leg out in front of him, and drew the other up. We wound among tract houses, turned onto a busy boulevard, and after a couple of miles found the nursing home on the left.
An ambulance was parked under a portico that protruded from the center of the low building. Double wooden doors opened onto a long hallway. Dad, inclined as if he were walking uphill, led the way. A group of mostly women in housecoats and bathrobes sat in an open lounge at the end of the hall, clustered around a television set. The nurses’ station was opposite. Dad ignored everybody and veered right down a branching hall. Barbara and I followed, nodding courtesies. He reached a door on the right, turned back to us, and said, “She’s in here.”
Just then a flustered nurse caught up with us and said, “Are you looking for Clare Taylor? She’s in therapy.”
We retraced our steps to a door off the main hall. We opened it and entered an L-shaped room. Mom was standing between a set of parallel waist-high bars that ran the length of the room. She was canted to her left, struggling to grip the bars, shuffling one step at a time. A large man in a white uniform supported her with ham-sized hands on her waist and encouraged her to keep moving. In a mirror along the back wall I could see that her chin was thrust forward in her old attitude of determination.
When she saw us, she tried to lift her left arm like a broken wing to wave. “Oh, boy,” she said to the therapist. “Can I stop now?”
“Let’s just go to the end, okay?” he said.
She shuffled to the end of the bars and turned awkwardly to sit in the wheelchair I’d taken there. She turned her face up to offer me a kiss. I saw endurance in her eyes, a kind of patience with suffering, and a mother’s full quotient of trust and love, which can never be equaled.
“You looked good up there,” I said.
A flicker of some inchoate emotion crossed her face, as if she’d formed an opinion she wasn’t ready to express. “It’s good to sit down,” she said.
We made a procession back to her room. There were two beds; hers was nearest the door. The woman in the other bed was whimpering, and when we entered and I helped Mom up on the bed, the roommate said, “Get the nurse. Please get the nurse.”
“She’s always calling for the nurse,” Mom said.
“Nurse, nurse,” the woman called.
“Oh, be quiet,” Mom said under her breath.
We sat for an hour. The woman in the next bed whimpered intermittently and called for the nurse. Just outside the room at the end of the hall, a man in a wheelchair was rolling himself furiously at the emergency exit door, as if it would shrink in fear and open. He would stop just short, back up, and propel himself at the door again, forward and back, forward and back, compulsively. A nurse came into the room and said it was mealtime. We started to say our goodbyes. “Aren’t you going to stay for dinner?” Mom asked.
“Not today, Mom,” I said. Dad was restless, and the home really wasn’t set up for dinner guests.
She pouted, but when the food came she turned her attention there.
The man in the wheelchair was muttering as we passed. He was saying, “This is no place to die, no place to die.”
For the next ten days, Barbara and I stayed at a rented beach house on Captiva Island. I spent each morning on a shaded porch fifty yards from the Gulf of Mexico, working on the screenplay. Each afternoon I drove the thirty miles into Fort Myers, picked up Dad, went to the nursing home to visit Mom, took him to lunch, and then, in one small office or another, tried to plan ahead. Barbara stayed behind with a project of her own to work on; she could add nothing to the planning, and as much as my parents liked her, the truth was that at this point, they wanted only me. The people at the nursing home were very sympathetic when they told me they could keep Mom as a Medicare patient only as long as she was making progress in her rehabilitation. Then Medicare no longer would pay. What then? The social worker at the nursing home, whose name was Henry Klein and who, I would learn, played guitar in a reggae band on weekends when he was not counseling the shell-shocked relatives of patients, cocked the heels of his cowboy boots on the edge of his desk, ground a cigarette into an overflowing ashtray, and ignored for a moment the constantly ringing telephone. He told me to apply for Medicaid.
I called for an appointment and a day or two later walked with Dad into the state welfare office to describe my parents’ poverty. This humiliating exercise meant going down a list of things they didn’t have: car or truck; motorcycle; burial insurance; trust funds; life insurance; burial plots; real estate; business equipment; boat; stocks or bonds. They owned nothing beyond the small checking and savings accounts I had set up with the money from their Mexican accounts. Their only income was their Social Security checks. It was not enough, however, to own nothing at that moment. They had to have owned nothing for three years; that is, any assets they had transferred within the past three years would count as assets, and the value of those assets would have to be spent on their care before they were dirt poor, and then, only then, the health care system of the richest country in the history of the world would provide for their long-term care. I saw my father moving from the apartment into a housing project, and determined to lie. That turned out to be unnecessary, because by adding my name to their accounts more than four years earlier in Mexico, they had in effect transferred their assets then.
Dad looked gaunt and stormy when I took him in to sign his application form. He hadn’t had his favorite khakis fixed; the zipper still pooched out, but I had decided I didn’t care. He had earned his eccentricities. And he was a good prop when it came to proving poverty. He didn’t look like somebody trying to beat the system. He looked as if he needed help.
To travel with Dad around the city was to be a hostage to his appetite. I ate several meals at a restaurant near the nursing home that baked sandwiches in flowerpots. But he was equally a hostage, and I shanghaied him one afternoon to the Sears hearing aid department.
“I don’t need a hearing aid,” he said as we weaved through the barbecue grills and lawn mowers on our way to the hearing center.
“Dad, we have to spend your money anyway. We might as well spend it on a hearing aid.” That was true. I had to submit their bank records for the Medicaid application, and the balance had to be below three thousand dollars.
He sat glumly in the waiting room. I said, “Dad, you’re alone now. You’ve got to know what’s going on.”
“I can hear what I need to hear,” he said.
The certified hearing aid examiner, a tall, older fellow with the solicitous manner of a civic club member in good standing, looked in Dad’s ears with an examining tool and asked him some questions. After a while he nodded gravely and leaned forward to look Dad in the eye. “You have profound hearing loss in one ear and about seventy percent loss in the other,” he said.
Dad raised his eyebrows in disbelief. He said, “I have?”
The fellow brought out a hearing aid. It was not one of the subtle models that snugs inconspicuously inside the ear, but the kind that fits behind it, hung on like a backpack. He said to me, “The smaller ones won’t work with your father’s hearing loss. He needs one with more power.” Dad looked at it, turned it over, sat uncomfortably as the man placed the plastic case behind his ear and pushed some waxy stuff inside his ear to make a mold. We left with a promise that the hearing aid would be ready in a few days.
Afterward we walked slowly through the mall. The local Corvette club had filled the mall with candy-colored hot rods that Dad surveyed with bland amazement. We went into a bookstore, and after he disappeared for a few moments I found him rearranging copies of my book so they’d be more visible. We sat on a bench near a trickling fountain sprinkled with pennies. I said, “Dad, what would you change if you had it to do over?”
He thought for a long moment, then shook his head.
“Well, would you have worked more on your art, tried to make a living at it, maybe?” I couldn’t imagine him not having regrets, even if they were along the lines of Wilfred Brimley playing Kathleen Turner’s grandfather in Peggy Sue Got Married. When she asked him the same question, he said, “I wish I’d taken better care of my teeth.”
Dad shook his head again, decisively this time. “I can’t think of anything,” he said.
We left the mall and headed for the nursing home.
We arrived to find Mom, jaw clenched, chin prognathous, negotiating the hallway behind a wheeled walker. A therapist trailed her discreetly. “Oh, goody,” she said when she saw us. “Get my wheelchair, will you?”
“Don’t you want to finish, Mom?” I asked.
“No, I want to lie down.”
She had a sling around her neck. I forgot what it was for until she was in the wheelchair and I started to turn her in the direction of her room. Her left arm dangled, and I saw just in time that her fingers were twined among the spokes of the wheel. A turn of the wheel could have broken them. She reached over and picked up her arm with her right hand and dropped it, lifeless, in her lap.
Dad and I helped her into bed. Her roommate stirred and immediately called out, “Nurse, nurse.”
Mom said, “Oh, shut up.”
The hours in the nursing home seemed endless. Dad sometimes would take a letter he’d received to read to her. But he always exhausted his supply of conversation quickly. Then he would move to a chair beside her bed, work a crossword puzzle if he had one, or just sit, not in any nobility of patience but in suspension, waiting. I exhausted the supply of magazines and Reader’s Digest condensed books in the nursing home’s small library (which was always empty in preference for the television area) looking for something that would interest Mom, but she no longer sustained much interest in anything she read. I would leave the room and return to find her sleeping, glasses lying in an open magazine. I tried to entertain her with news of my work, to which she would listen with attention. I took her a small radio with an earphone so she could listen to Larry King at night. Believing that sometimes kindness and lies, as Graham Greene wrote, are worth a thousand truths, I spoke to her of the time when she would be home again.
Freed from caring for my mother, Dad went swimming. Each afternoon when we returned from the nursing home, he would change into a pair of swimming trunks, take a towel, and head downstairs. He was a sight with his pale, skinny legs and his pacemaker bulging in his chest. He would lower himself gingerly into the pool and swim in place for a few minutes, climb out dripping, and trail water as he returned to the apartment. I couldn’t explain this sudden interest—as far as I knew, it was years since he’d gone swimming—but I was encouraged by it. Anything that took him out of the apartment and into the world could be good for us both.
We returned to pick up his hearing aid. The examiner wiggled the earpiece into place and made a few adjustments, and Dad walked out wearing it. Here again I saw the potential for new life and increased independence.
Barbara and I returned to New York. I began a round of interviews and book parties and intense days of collaborative writing on the screenplay. I spoke with Dad almost every night. I always asked him if he’d been to see Mom. After a short time his visits began to grow infrequent. If Bess wasn’t going he had to take taxis, and he didn’t like to wait for them or spend the money. I, too, was neglecting Mom. Reaching her by phone at the nursing home was almost impossible, and each day was so packed with writing that at the end I wanted nothing but to stop. But eventually I wrote:
Dad has had a little trouble getting out to see you, Mom, because Bess Jones has been away. I’ve been encouraging him to take cabs. It’s expensive, but he tells me he keeps opening drawers at your apartment and finding wads of Mexican pesos. When I was there we found 320,000 pesos, and he told me that he found another 500,000 pesos last week. It amounted to about $250 altogether. So he has some found money he can use.
Henry Klein there at [the nursing home] told me Friday you’re still doing therapy. This means that you’re still making progress in getting that left side working again. I know it’s discouraging to have to work so hard when you want to take it easy, but I think it’s worthwhile in the long run.
Well, it’s Saturday afternoon, pleasantly and unexpectedly warm (Indian summer), and I’m going to try to make a little progress in revising the screenplay. I expect to be off on a new book project before long. So I’ll say goodbye now. Barbara and I think of you a lot, and I know you think of us, too. Much love and many warm thoughts from both of us.
A week after we had arrived back in New York, the nursing home called in a frenzy. “Your father told us yesterday he was taking your mother out for the afternoon. She came back at eleven o’clock this morning. If she hadn’t, she would have been discharged against medical advice.” The woman paused to let me absorb this. “And Medicare would not have paid,” she added.
“What did you do?” I asked Dad when I got him on the phone. “Did you lead some kind of jailbreak?”
He chuckled, sounding pleased with himself “I went to see your mother and she said she wanted to go home,” he said.
“So of course you took her home.”
“Yes. I called a cab. And then the next morning Bess came upstairs and said the nursing home was frantic and that she wasn’t supposed to be gone overnight. Nobody told me.”
I asked him if he had been wearing his hearing aid. “That damned thing,” he said. “I don’t like it. There’s too much static. I can hear better without it.”
On my next trip to Fort Myers, in November, Dad surprised me with a question. “What’s this about cassettes?” he asked.
I explained that there were audio and video cassettes. I said, “Some have music. Some have movies.”
“Movies,” he said.
We went to Wal-Mart the same day and bought a videotape player. A rack near the checkout line held a selection of inexpensive movies, and we bought a compilation of Laurel and Hardy shorts and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, with Gregory Peck. I hooked up the machine and played the Laurel and Hardy tape. Dad watched avidly for a few moments. He said, “That’s really something.” Then he picked up his paper and folded it to the crossword puzzle.
The next day we were driving past the old Fort Myers airport, now a general aviation field, as a small plane came in over the road for a slow landing. “You know, Nick,” Dad said, “I think I’d like to learn to fly.”
“Fly?” I cut a glance at him. He was gazing through the windshield, looking quite intrepid, as I remembered him at the helm of his boat, which he had named after my mother, but also quite old. His forehead was ravaged, the hair tinctured, the whites of his eyes a mucous brown. The hearing aid protruded behind his ear like an astronaut’s jet pack. I had made him put it on before we left the house that morning. He reached up to adjust it.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve always thought I would.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It was always something.”
I wish I could say that at that moment I turned the car around and found a pilot who would take us up. I thought about his heart, his hearing. But somebody in love with romance would have done it, put Dad in a front seat with redundant controls so he could touch them and feel the plane move and see out over the cowling to a horizon that held whatever he was looking for. Or maybe not. “It takes a long time to learn to fly,” I said.
“Does it?” he said. “I think it would be nice, though.”
We drove on.
That night I spoke to Barbara on the phone. “He wants to learn to fly,” I said.
“Of course,” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘Of course’? He never in his life said anything about wanting to learn to fly.”
“Yes, but Bess said her sons were pilots. Don’t you remember? She said they’d flown down to see her in their private planes. This isn’t about flying. It’s about Bess.”
I felt a moment of joy at life’s essential silliness when I hung up the phone. Dad had a crush on Bess. I should have seen it coming. I recalled how brilliantly he smiled when she walked into Woolworth’s and sat down with us. And she had told me, punctuating the story with indulgent laughter, of how he rushed to claim the front seat each time she offered him and another man from the apartment building a ride to breakfast. I could not be angry with him for what this implied about his feelings for my mother, only happy at the stirrings of life. The old cock still crowed, if feebly, proving the beautiful longevity of our illusions.
Mom had a suitor of her own, in any case. The nurses told us one of the other nursing home residents was taken with her. The man they pointed out occupied a wheelchair and, when I saw him, always wore brown clothes. He had thick glasses and tufts of black hair and followed her around with a wacky, smitten smile. She paid him the courtesies, but that was all.
She languished in the nursing home. Her Medicaid application was approved. Her rehabilitation reached its peak and her therapy wound down to a daily dose of maintenance meant to keep her from declining. With a shuffle of paper and the scratch of a pen, she changed from a convalescent, implying a future, to a permanent resident. Most of the residents gathered before the television set in the lounge opposite the nurses’ station, but Mom wasn’t drawn to the pacifier, with its game shows and soap operas, the way the others were. She had never watched TV. Her habit would have been to read, but she didn’t want to do that either. She preferred to lie in bed.
Toward the end of the year, a bed opened at a nursing home five minutes from the apartment, and Mom was moved. Dad started to visit her regularly again. I, too, settled into a routine, flying to Fort Myers every month or six weeks.